


in, and out, and in, and out

by Mici (noharlembeat)



Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Angst, M/M, Mentions of Suicide, Mourning, no actual suicide
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-03-11
Updated: 2015-03-11
Packaged: 2018-03-17 07:54:38
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,403
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3521423
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/noharlembeat/pseuds/Mici
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>
  <i>He planned for this.</i>
</p>
            </blockquote>





	in, and out, and in, and out

**Author's Note:**

  * For [radialarch](https://archiveofourown.org/users/radialarch/gifts).



> Christ, look, please be aware that this fic has some majorly damaged headspace and contains a lot of REALLY INTENSE FEELINGS and that I ALMOST CRIED WRITING IT so just be advised, okay? HEED THE WARNINGS.

Sometimes he breathes - in, and out, and in, and out - and he remembers that he planned for this, from the time he was seven and realized that his best friend was more likely to die of lack of air than he was to die from a head injury, and Steve’s affections towards head injuries seemed to run toward the _extreme_.

He planned for this.

He wakes up and he breathes - in, and out, and in, and out - and he stares up at the ceiling and he stays there in his uncomfortable bed, frozen in place, because like every single morning since his brain uncharitably slotted the pieces of exactly what happened together, he feels like if he sits up, gravity will release him into the abyss.

He stays another moment because if he stays, just another moment, eyes fixed on the crack that runs from one wall to the other, he can imagine that he was just fast enough, that _the end of the line_ wasn’t _the actual_ end of the line. Of any line.

But the moment passes and he gets up because if he doesn’t get up, Sam will come and get him and drag him into the shower. He’s done it before. He did it every day for two months, back in the beginning, when Sam found him. Who else could have done it? Natasha was looking in the spy community, and Stark was looking almost everywhere else, but it was Sam, not looking at all, just working for the VA and doing his job, talking to people on the street, who sat next to him one day and shook his head, and said _I must be crazy_.

But that was before the pieces, before his head, before the memories sorted themselves out from what was real and what was fake, back before he was functional, if anyone could call his half-life _function_ as opposed to form.

He struggles with then. He focuses on now.

Now he breathes.

Now he breathes and he gets up and he showers, and mutters, “I’d give up hot water,” and takes a cold shower, and dries off - metal arm first, then his shorn hair, and his chest, his ass, his dick, legs, and works his way back to his bedroom. 

Now he dries off and dresses in something black, that feels slim. He thinks he’ll wear black for the rest of his life, and he comes into the kitchen. The apartment belongs to Sam; it’s rent-controlled and in Harlem, but the truth is that he prefers living in Harlem now, compared to living in Brooklyn. In Brooklyn he feels like he’s circling the drain, like there’s a ghost that’s following him, cold fingers of memory and nostalgia creeping up the last soft spots in his brain. In Brooklyn there’s something worse than fear, there’s hope, like maybe what his brain tells him happened is a lie.

Sam’s in the kitchen, stretching, one leg up and then the other; he’s already been for a run. “It’s cold,” he says, with a frown, “and wet. I ran through what must have been every puddle between here and NYU.”

Bucky doesn’t reply, but then, replying, it always feels like so much energy. Sam’s got enough for two. “I got you a waffle, though. Don’t look at me like that,” Sam says, and he’s already rummaging through the drawer, “you know the rules.”

There are a lot of rules to living with Sam - it’s practically like living in the army, only all of these rules are arbitrary and designed to make Bucky think about things that aren’t rules at all. “Waffles on-”

“I know,” Bucky interrupts, then, finally, feeling like his throat is swelling from just the talking. “I’ll eat the waffles,” he promises. “Rules are rules.”

 _I don’t like rules for the sake of rules_ , is what he hears, although Steve never said that.

~~~~

There are other rules, one that Sam doesn’t make, and Sam doesn’t like, either. They’re Maria Hill rules, because an army of lawyers and a sternly worded promise, along with what Bucky imagines is guilt that only the name _Captain America_ can conjure up in the minds of rich white politicians made it so that Bucky was firmly under the watch of at least one government agency at a time. The CIA was first, back when Bucky couldn’t be brought to leave the apartment, then the NSA, and then the reserve. Now it was subcontracted out to Stark, for some stupid sentimental reason, and Maria Hill made the rules.

Maria Hill rules said: leave the house and there are three people, on rotation, at all times, watching.

In practicality, it was actually more like six. Bucky made two right out the gate, and the third and fourth he caught after walking about ten feet. The last two, he didn’t bother. It was stupid. Where was he going to _go_? What would be the _point_? It wasn’t as if he had great ambitions. 

They said _what if you don’t have your head on straight_ , and Bucky never argued, except that he _does_ , and that’s the problem. If he didn’t have his head on straight, if he wasn’t a fully functional person, if he could blame the abyss inside of him on missing memories or failed neuron synapses, don’t they think he would be so much _happier_?

On most days, he goes to work; Sam helped him get a job as the muscle for a moving company, because it was simple and quiet where it counted - meaning inside of his own head - and people didn’t talk to him much. He knew the cues, the way to smile, the way to nod his head and not complain, and people would thank him and pay him and he would just keep pretending. It’s easy.

Today, he has the day off, and Sam knows it, so he probably can’t be gone long before Sam will start to worry. He goes to Central Park, and eats a hot dog, and when a little girl throws a ball his way, he throws it back, gently. She must be about six, he thinks, and she waddles up to him, her parka making her look like a puffy purple cloud, her scarf wrapped firmly around her head. Her mom, or maybe her nanny, who knows anymore, _parents_ these days, is watching nearby. “Mister,” she says, “do you want to play ball with me?”

She has a lisp, so it’s more like _mithter_ , and a mop of blonde hair that sticks up in so many directions, she looks a little like a porcupine. “Don’t you want to play with your-” he nods up at the woman, who is starting to cut across the lawn between them. 

“Mommy’s boring,” the little girl announces. “She doesn’t throw far.”

“Lauren, don’t bother the nice man,” the mom says, and Bucky just stays still, like he’s forgotten how to move. “Sorry,” she says.

There’s a moment of silence, too long, and Bucky hears _it’s all right_ in his head, in Steve’s voice, like a cue. He opens his mouth to say it, but someone beats him to it. “It’s all right,” Natasha says, coming up the side, and sitting next to Bucky, taking her hand in his. 

The mom, who was tensed up, nervous at the way Bucky didn’t respond right away, eases. Natasha’s smiling, she looks so calm, her hair short and curly now, as the mom and daughter walk away.

Bucky very carefully takes his hand back. “What do you want?” he asks, frowning.

“Not even a hello?” she replies back, that smile on her lips, the one she favors when she wants to be charming. 

But Bucky knows better. He doesn’t find her charming at all. Everyone sees the smile, he sees the venom. “What. Do you want,” he repeats, less a question and more a statement.

She just stays silent for a moment. “I wanted to see how you were doing,” she finally admits, and Bucky measures that against if he thinks its true, and decides it probably is. “Sam won’t tell me.”

“I asked him not to,” Bucky replies, drawing his shoulders down, looking away from her.

There’s silence between them for a while, and finally she turns, and asks, “Why?”

“Why would I trust you?” he snaps back, “why would you want me to?”

“Steve trusted me,” she says, and it’s a mistake, because suddenly the corners of Bucky’s vision are going spotted and black, suddenly, and he has to remember - in, and out, and in, and out.

But Bucky is in control. They think, probably as a measure of caution, that there’s still Hydra’s beast in there, darkly pacing in the back of Bucky’s head like a lion in a cage, but that’s not true. It’s only Bucky. It’s only ever been Bucky. “That’s not saying much. Steve trusted _me_. He doesn’t exactly have the greatest track record.”

“He didn’t,” she starts, a correction, and Bucky’s hands are suddenly around her wrists. They’re tiny, her wrists. If he twists his hands fast enough, he could snap them. She is good, but he’s better. He’s had longer to do this, and from the look in her eye, she knows it. “He didn’t,” she repeats.

“Don’t say that, like you _knew_ him,” Bucky all but snarls. “If you had known him, you would have _stopped_ him. Instead you let him _keep going_.” He presses his thumbs into her wrists, just a little more, just a bit harder. “You and your little band, you don’t get to claim him.”

She just looks at him, her eyes fixed on his, her mouth stern, but Bucky knows fear when he sees it, especially when it’s from the graduate of the Widow program. “What hurts most? That you lost him, or that he was moving on?”

Bone cracks - her right wrist. She doesn’t cry out. “That he loved me, right to the end. Right to the very end. Don’t think, not for a single second, that you or anyone else gets to take that away from me.” He lets her wrist go, and to her credit, she doesn’t massage it. It’s a fracture, at most, hairline. She’s had worse. “You’re smart, but you have no idea. The depth of it.”

There’s that silence again; someone could fill caverns with it, pour it into sinkholes and disguise them as solid ground. “You’re still hurting.”

“I’m going to hurt until the day I die,” Bucky says, and he stands up, puts his hands in his pockets. “You got your chance. If you ever talk to me about him again, I’ll kill you.” He means it, and she knows he means it, because he can see it in her face; it’s the look of someone who knows, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that the monsters under the bed are real, and their teeth are dripping with flesh and bone, and that when it decides on you, there’s no fighting it. 

He walks away.

 _Please, don’t,_ is what he hears, _bully_ , the accusation flies, landing between his shoulderblades like rotten fruit. 

“This is who I am without you.” he mutters, to no one, to the only person who matters.

~~~~~

He sits in a cafe for almost three hours. 

He used to be unable to do this - to sit still and quiet for extended periods of time, to watch the world unfurl, layer by layer - but he thinks he learned it even before the war, back when he used to sit and watch Steve draw. Steve had been impatient any time but when he was drawing, and he made Bucky learn it by proxy, made him learn it _better_. They molded each other from childhood. They were each other’s bad habits.

Now he gets to sit and watch and drink a cup of something very hot, and watch the people come and go. He thinks that girls were prettier, back in the 40s, or maybe it wasn’t that they were prettier, but they were more familiar. Now he can’t always puzzle them out, or what it is they want. So many of them are so skinny, tiny, like they’re trying to disappear, with thin legs and thin arms, and the ones who aren’t seem ashamed of it, like they wish they could vanish. 

It almost makes him smile - he can feel the twitch at the corners of his mouth - when he sees a girl who clearly doesn’t care that she’s not a rail, who clearly spent hours on her makeup and her clothes so that she could go to the corner cafe and flirt with the man behind the counter. It almost makes him smile to see that kind of personality.

Almost, because the other thing it does is carve methodical, precise portions of his heart away, the knife of the familiar and the beloved too distinctly sharp to do anything but destroy. 

Not that Steve ever flirted with anyone. But he was short and skinny and slight, and even now that’s how Bucky remembers him best, wearing that oversized coat he wore everywhere and not caring about what people said about him, in his hearing or not. 

He watches as the girl orders and turns, and he finds himself getting up, reaching into his pocket, and handing over a ten dollar bill. “For her coffee. Whatever she likes,” he says, and the twitch is there.

She looks at him, and she smiles, and says, “Thank you, but you don’t have to-” and he shakes his head a little, ducks it.

“You’re welcome,” he replies, and takes a step back. But really, he feels, maybe he should be thanking her, instead. For the twitch.

He goes and he sits in the corner again, and finishes his third drink, and watches as she takes her drink and sits at the bar, and pulls out a journal from her bag to start writing. Bucky knows that anything he feels, whatever it his that his heart is doing, it’s just a shadow of breaking - they’re hairline fractures, spiderwebbing over the remains, but they’re doing it now.

He watches until the twitches turn into a smile, and then he gets up and goes out the door, and as soon as he can find a private corner (there are always private corners) he puts his hands on his head, holds himself there a long minute, holds himself together. There’s no one to do it for him, no matter how much anyone tries. He’s scattered himself, pieces flying in so many directions, he thinks that in a hundred years they’ll still be finding them, hiding under chairs and under bridges, lying where they fell, James Buchanan Barnes, hero and assassin all in one.

He calls Steve.

His voicemail hasn’t been dismantled. It’s a short message, just a few seconds of Steve’s voice. “This is Rogers, please leave a message.” It’s something someone helped him with, clearly. Bucky remembers phones, before. There was a person, usually a woman, who would connect calls. Messages were written down.

Voices weren’t saved like this.

“One day,” Bucky says, after the beep, “someone is going to check your voicemail. It’s going to be a really bad day for me, bud. It’ll ruin my reputation forever,” he says, and he tries to make it light. He only has a few more seconds. The machine will cut him off. “It’s...it’s been a day. Let’s put it that way. Your friends won’t lay off. I miss you. I love you. I’m sorry.” 

He hangs up. It feels so completely modern, leaving Steve messages like that. He supposes, if things had gone the way they were supposed to, if this was 1946 and there was no war and Steve finally lost to illness, he would have written letters, piles and piles of letters. This is different. Better, maybe. Nothing to throw away, nothing to burn, nothing to hide. Just words, floating in space.

The mailbox is filled with the same iteration of this message. _I miss you. I love you._

_I’m sorry._

~~~~

He comes home later than he should. It’s almost five; his detail has changed once already, and he’s already texted Sam twice, to let him know. Sam is standing in the doorway of the building when he gets there, though. “Turn around,” he says, sharply, but it isn’t in an angry way.

“No parties, you promised, no parties.”

“This isn’t a party,” Sam replies, “are you kidding me? There isn’t a party on this planet that I’d take you to right now.”

Bucky stares, and decides he’s not in any mood to fight Sam about this, so he just does as he’s told, and Sam hails a cab, and Bucky sits, and the cab drives. 

They get to the cemetery just as the light is fading. There’s a brisk wind. 

Steve’s grave is really pretty. Sam made sure of that, because Sam is the kind of friend that Steve needed in this world, the kind of friend that Bucky was, once. “I threatened Natasha,” Bucky says, without prompting. 

“I know,” Sam replies, “every time you do that, it just makes it harder for me to try and ask her out. So come on, please stop ruining my game. I’m begging you.”

“It’s the last time, I promise,” Bucky assures him, and they stand there, the two of them. He doesn’t add that it’s because he’s pretty sure that the dreaded Black Widow finally realized that there was something in him that really would kill her, if she tried talking to him about Steve again. 

The grave is under a really big tree, and Steve’s really there. Every time they visit, it’s the same. Bucky finally gets what his head told him from the moment he saw Steve on that bridge, he finally gets _this is the man you love and this is the man who loved you_. Only he got it too late, only he stood there too long, moments too long, when the world was crashing and burning around them, only he pulled him out and Steve’s lungs had finally-

-Bucky had always planned for this, but he remembers when he finally wrapped his head around Steve’s new size, thanking God, because he might have to worry about blows to the brain but never about things like _pneumonia_ or _fluid in Steve’s lungs_ again.

He starts laughing so hard he cries, and and cries, and cries, and Sam stands there and he’s quiet because Sam knows what a broken heart looks like, he knows what complete loss looks like, he knows what someone scattered looks like.

Bucky doesn’t know how long they stand there, and then Sam nods up. “I’m going to go up, see my grandma.”

Bucky nods a bit, and he sits. A part of him is tethered here, he thinks. There’s another grave, in Arlington, with a statue, it’s tastefully done, but this is the one Bucky likes. This is the one near Steve’s mam, near Bucky’s entire family. It’s got a tree. “I only thought about killing myself once today,” he says. “And every time I do I think you’d probably lose it, so I don’t do it.” His voice is still shaking. “I miss you. I love you. I’m sorry.”

He knows that Steve would tell him to stop it, to stop saying those things, but he doesn’t say them for Steve. He says them because they’re like pressing on an infected wound, pushing the sore so it’s clean again. “It’s my birthday,” he says, then, _finally_. “I’m ninety-eight. I feel it. If you were here, we’d, you’d, I’d...make you kiss me. In front of everyone. That’s what I would want. To finally let the world know someone saw all of you.”

He stops talking. He hates doing it, which is why Sam leaves, because he always thinks, this is stupid, this is sappy. This is not who I am. I’m not a war widow, talking to the shade of the man I loved. I’m not someone to be pitied.

Sam comes back a little while later. “Ready?” he asks.

No, is what Bucky thinks, he’ll never be ready. But he unfolds, he gets up.

They go home, and Bucky goes to bed, stares at the crack above his head. Breathes - in, and out, and in, and out. He remembers he always planned for this.

**Author's Note:**

> Ba-dum tish, happy birthday, Bucky Barnes! The request was "a fic where Steve is dead and Bucky mourns" and well, I'm not one to resist such things. Heavy gratitude to Christopher Isherwood on this one. If you haven't seen A Single Man, I have no idea what you're waiting for.


End file.
